2020

Warren’s maneuver stands as a warning sign for other presidential contenders. Getting into the mud pit with Trump—who doesn’t care about political decorum, rules, sexism, racism, name-calling, facts, or reason—has revealed itself as a sucker’s game. Like a scientist trying to argue with a climate-change denier, you’ll just end up drowning in a tide of bad faith.

Donald Trump has long deployed the name “Pocahontas” to diminish Elizabeth Warren as an affirmative-action grifter who exaggerated her Native American heritage to climb to the top of her profession. For the white-grievance set, it’s a powerful piece of rhetoric, designed to mock Warren and her fellows who think they know better. Predictably, the elites routinely side with Warren in this juvenile war of words. Civility!

But let us put aside niceties for a moment and state the obvious: the questions over Warren’s Native American heritage are legitimate, of her own making, and have the potential to torpedo her presidential aspirations in 2020. Many Democrats, and some in the press, have dismissed the debate over Warren’s ancestry as somehow out-of-bounds, akin to Trump’s ridiculous quest to find Barack Obama’s “missing” birth certificate. Warren’s case is not the same at all.

The Obama birther charade was a fabrication rooted in nothing but mouth-breathing racism. But the Warren story can be traced back more than 30 years. Beginning in 1986, she listed herself as a minority in a national directory of law professors for nearly a decade while teaching at the University of Texas and University of Pennsylvania. She once contributed to a Native American cookbook as “Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee.” She told Harvard Law School that she was Native American, and was identified that way in Harvard records without objection. It’s illogical to suggest that these claims were the reason she was able to climb to the pinnacle of American public life, but they do come off as a little weird, worthy of further inspection and kitchen-table conversation. And the whole story is perfect chum for Trump.

At a time when race and identity are twisting up our politics, Warren knows her personal history is a vulnerability as much as the president does. That’s precisely why the Massachusetts senator released the glossy video addressing her family’s background, to arm her supporters with some talking points and make clear that she won’t take Trump’s punches lying down. Warren may be a bespectacled Harvard professor, but anyone watching her career knows she rarely shies away from a fight. The Bernie bros will surely disagree, but over the years, Warren has done more than most any Democrat to break down her party’s orthodoxy on corporate power. She’s as tenacious as anyone in the U.S. Senate and any Democrat mulling a challenge to Trump.

“With that video, you see someone who is tough, someone who is willing to be emotional and show herself, and show that there is a human impact from the attacks Trump makes,” said Jennifer Palmieri, a former senior adviser to President Obama and Hillary Clinton. “It was meant to show, ‘I’m going to take you on.’ Whether or not it was a great idea, well . . . we will see.”

In the clip, Warren is seen visiting her ancestral home of Oklahoma, showcasing her Republican roots, and interviewing several relatives to validate a now-famous piece of family lore: that her great-great-great-grandmother was part Native American. Warren revealed the results of a Stanford DNA analysis showing that she likely had a Native American ancestor between 6 and 10 generations back. The data point was in turn presented to Trump as proof of her biographical claims, packaged into a big media rollout for Monday. All this hard political work—the DNA test, the fancy video, the big Boston Globe piece, the Google search ads, the splash page, the finely tuned messaging—and how did Trump respond to this ruthless counter-offensive? Exactly as you’d expect. He laughed at her and moved along.

It’s next to impossible to argue that Warren’s political standing is better today than it was before she released the video. Warren’s first big foray into the nascent presidential campaign was on Trump’s terms, not her own, having been trolled into producing and distributing a mini-doc that broadcast her biggest political liability directly into the maw of the Internet. Warren gifted her opponents a new and embarrassing line of attack—I’m between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American! Take that, Donald!—that will go down alongside John Edwards’s $400 haircut and Mitt Romney’s 47 percent gaffe in the annals of numeric political blunders. Meanwhile, with the midterms just around the bend, Warren’s attempt at national brand-building just felt too methodical, too calculated, too self-involved, too political. “Can she just wait three weeks?” an aide to a top-tier Democratic Senate candidate texted me after the video came out. Nothing about it seemed helpful.

Warren’s maneuver stands as a warning sign for other Democrats on the path to challenging Trump in 2020. Getting into the mud pit with Trump—who doesn’t care about political decorum, rules, sexism, racism, name-calling, facts, or reason—has revealed itself as a sucker’s game for politicians and peacocking White House correspondents who try to joust with him. Talk to anyone in politics, and they’ll tell you the same thing: tangling with Trump is just really hard, and there’s no clear alternative playbook. Like a scientist trying to argue with a climate-change denier, you’ll just end up drowning in a tide of bad faith.

This was made apparent in the 2016 Republican primary, most memorably when Marco Rubio decided to abandon his kid-glove approach to Trump and engage him with name-calling and middle-school taunts. Rubio’s campaign quickly collapsed as he was gleefully curb-stomped by the eventual G.O.P. nominee. “You can’t out-Trump Trump,” said Terry Sullivan, a longtime Rubio adviser. “The problem with that is after you set your hair on fire, you have to be willing to double down and keep adding gasoline to your head. And that’s not a normal human reaction to being on fire.”

Even so, Warren has been punching at Trump ever since he took office. Rarely does she let one of Trump’s personal attacks go unchallenged, something that sets her apart from most every Democrat who might run in 2020, aside from Orange County attorney Michael Avenatti.Cory Booker has been preaching a campaign based on love and hugs; Beto O’Rourke is fond of calling his Senate campaign “big-hearted”; Bernie Sanders doesn’t want to talk about anything but the economy; and Joe Biden had to quickly back down when he joked about physical violence against Trump.

“You can’t out-Trump Trump. The problem with that is after you set
your hair on fire, you have to be willing to double down and keep
adding gasoline to your head. And that’s not a normal human reaction
to being on fire.”

For the most part, Democrats thinking about the White House are pondering ways to articulate a compelling worldview that doesn’t include responding to every one of Trump’s broadsides. Warren seems to take the opposite view. She has rained down a barrage of personal insults on Trump dating back to 2016, calling him “a loser,” a “selfish little sleazeball,” “a two-bit con man,” a “pathetic cheapskate,” and a “small, insecure money-grubber.” She enjoys replying directly to Trump’s tweets attacking her. In June, after Trump taunted her yet again with a Pocahontas tweet, Warren reveled in the attention during a speech in Nevada. “Look, he thinks he’s going to shut me up?” she told a crowd outside Las Vegas. “That’s not going to happen, baby!”

Warren’s line drew big applause, and became the lead of the New York Times dispatch from the speech. Her pugilism suggests she’s leaning into the prevailing dynamic of media coverage in the Trump era, which is that combat gets you more attention than a diatribe about student-loan relief. “You idiots in the media are only willing to cover what drives clicks, and the only thing that drives clicks anymore is Donald Trump,” Sullivan told me. “The harder you punch the more he draws you in, and if you’re not punching him, no one is paying attention to you.”

Taking this approach too far presents a dangerous risk for her and other Democrats. If you play by Trump’s rules, there’s a good chance you not only lose your campaign, but you lose yourself, too. Authenticity is the coin of the realm in political campaigns, and the more Warren strays from the economic arguments that brought her to the apex of politics in the first place, the less compelling her argument for the presidency becomes. Remember Bobby Jindal? The onetime Louisiana governor was a Harvard and Yale-accepted Rhodes Scholar who was one of the only Republican candidates in 2016 to draft a serious health-care plan. But Jindal bowed to the zeitgeist of the moment and decided to run as a red-meat, Duck Dynasty-watching, gun-loving Tea Party conservative. It was his only chance to get in the news cycle, sure, but his bizarre rebrand did nothing except paper over his only argument for becoming president, that he was actually a smart Mister Fix-It.

Warren is always at her best when she’s talking about income inequality and the fabled pocketbook issues that are so precious to working-class and middle-class voters. In 2014, when she was an in-demand speaker that midterm year, I witnessed her address a room of beefy union dudes in West Virginia. By the end of her speech—a lucid and concise call to arms against credit-card companies, predatory mortgage lenders, and Wall Street bankers—the Harvard Law professor had the audience roaring. She was similarly impressive when I interviewed her in the summer of 2017 for my Snapchat show, Good Luck America, about Trump’s appeal to working-class whites. Not only did she shy away from bashing him, but she also gave him a dash of credit. “Donald Trump did more than just entertain,” Warren told me, with a convincing passion flaring in her eyes. “He spoke to a genuine anger, a rightful anger. People get it, they feel it, when they see their own opportunities shrinking up, and the opportunities of their children shrinking up.”

But I remember something else from that day. After our interview in Amherst, Warren delivered a graduation speech at the University of Massachusetts. It was the middle of the day, but plenty of students were already drunk or hitting their vape pens. The crowd applauded for the most part and laughed as Warren made a few jokes about the obvious drinking going on. But there was also a smattering of “POCAHONTAS” shouts as Warren took the stage, mainly coming from the bro-types who often say they like Trump because he’s funny and entertaining. With a simple nickname, Trump invented an easy touchstone not just for people inclined to dislike Warren, but for regular people who are only passive consumers of politics. Trump was in their heads that day, and it became abundantly clear this week that he is in Warren’s head, too.

Warren’s head-on embrace of the Pocahontas fight has also touched off an uneasy debate on the left about race and who gets to identify as a minority in this country. There have been plenty of responses to Warren’s move this week, but none seemed to land harder than the statement released by the Cherokee Nation. “Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong,” it said in a statement. “It makes a mockery out of DNA tests and its legitimate uses while also dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven.” That Warren or her team apparently failed to run the video announcement by the Cherokee Nation or other Native American groups is a woeful bit of political malpractice that should give her supporters pause. Nor did Warren recruit any actual Native Americans to help validate her story, or to at least talk about what she’s done as senator to help their community. Instead, Warren was out there on her own, looking to many like a white person on the Internet boasting about being at least 1/1,024th Cherokee.

But the Pocahontas flap is about more than who is and who isn’t Native American. It’s also about how race gets talked about in the Democratic Party, a party that depends on African Americans, Hispanics, and woke millennials. It hasn’t been hard to find Democrats this week who believe Warren revealed an alarming blind spot when it comes to race, a dynamic that could easily flare in a primary featuring multiple African-American and Hispanic candidates. “She looks like she’s trying to co-opt the Native American identity without having ever lived that experience,” said an adviser to one likely Democratic candidate in 2020, who would only speak anonymously about the early contours of the presidential field. “Race is not about what percent DNA you are. It is about the experience you live, how you are treated when you try to hail a cab, and how you are treated when you walk into a restaurant, and how you are treated by your government. It’s tone-deaf.”

Bakari Sellers, a CNN analyst and former Democratic legislator from the early-primary state of South Carolina, was even more blunt. “Not only is it an abuse of affirmative action, it’s ignorant of how race is dealt with or how race is defined,” said Sellers, who remains involved in his state’s political scene. “She is not Native American. She’s not a leader on issues relating to indigenous people. It’s ignorant of their culture. It’s selfish. It’s all about her and Donald Trump. And having two white people argue about who is indigenous is Peak 2018.”

This is probably not where Warren wanted to be on the eve of her re-election to the Senate in Massachusetts, which in normal times would cleanly transition into an on-message presidential announcement early next year, followed by a few visits to Iowa and New Hampshire. But here Warren is nevertheless, clashing about race and DNA tests with a habitual liar who really enjoys calling her names, angering her fellow Democrats and prominent racial leaders in the process. That doesn’t feel like the best way to embark on a presidential campaign, and it certainly doesn’t feel like Elizabeth Warren the populist, the up-from-the-bootstraps fighter who built the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau almost by sheer will and helped usher in a new era of economic thinking in the Democratic Party. It feels instead like Warren got stuck in the waiting room of the C.F.P.B. and started yelling at Fox News.

Warren has demonstrated for every Democrat the risk of brawling with Trump on his terms, in his vocabulary, on a battlefield that is fundamentally asymmetrical. It’s actually easy to fight a culture war. But how do you win one once you’re in it? Warren has to figure that out, because there’s no turning back now.